THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD: A LINGUIST READS THE MENU PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Dan Jurafsky | 256 pages | 20 Nov 2015 | WW Norton & Co | 9780393351620 | English | New York, United States The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu But we also found that expensive menus were shorter and more implicit. High-status restaurants want their customers to presuppose that food will be fresh, crisp and delicious. The surfeit of adjectives on middle-priced menus is thus a kind of overcompensation, a sign of status anxiety, and only the cheapest restaurants, in which the tastiness of the food might be in question, must overly protest the toothsomeness of their treats. We are surrounded by the language of food, words that offer a window into our psyche, our finances and our society. Dan Jurafsky is professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. Accessibility help Skip to navigation Skip to content Skip to footer Cookies on FT Sites We use cookies opens in new window for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to analyse how our Sites are used. Manage cookies. Dan Jurafsky August 22, Reuse this content opens in new window. Promoted Content. Close drawer menu Financial Times International Edition. Uhh, what? In layman's terms, an expensive restaurant will likely have a shorter menu, while a middle-of-the-road eatery will have a longer menu packed with descriptive words like "fresh," "rich," and "crisp. The cheaper the restaurant, the more customize-able the words. Finally, says Jurafsky, a lower-end eatery is more likely to include selling points such as offering dishes "your way," rather than serving plates as the chef creates them. With more renowned chefs, we'd suppose, they'd like to think that their way is your way. Find more great food content on Delish :. Search for the perfect recipe from our homepage Find out the latest food news Get a recipe book to save your favorite dishes Sign up for our free newsletters Check us out on Facebook , Pinterest , and Twitter. Kitchen Tips and Tools. United States. Type keyword s to search. What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu? You don't have to be a foodie to find "The Language of Food" a high enjoyable and compelling read" Boston Globe "entertaining and revealing throughout" The Economist "Fascinating. You'll never think of ketchup, French fries, fish and chips, or toast in the same way" -Deborah Tannen, author of the 1 bestseller You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation "Dan Jurafsky has taken on the subject with scholarship, wit, and charm, making The Language of Food a very engaging book. The linguistics of menus — Remains of the Day Mentions of tradition occurred more than twice as often on inexpensive chips. Our linear regression showed that every time a family or an American locale is mentioned, the price per ounce of the chips drops 10 cents. The inexpensive chips thus represent a model of authenticity rooted in family traditions and family-run companies, and set in regional locations throughout America. For the upper class, by contrast, being authentic means being natural, using quality natural ingredients and avoiding artificial ingredients, preservatives, and so on. Words like artificial or fake are used solely in the expensive chip advertising. Even though most of the inexpensive chips also contain no preservatives, this fact is only mentioned in expensive chip advertising. Of course we all want to be special, and live an authentic life, whether we draw our metaphors from nature or from tradition. These models of natural versus traditional authenticity are part of our national dialogue, two of the many ways of framing that make up our ongoing conversation about who we are. The red state and blue state models of our nation are deeply inscribed in our collective discussion-- written on the back of every bag of potato chips. Hot days are rare in San Francisco, so random strangers have been smiling at each other on Mission Street and the lines are extra-long on the sidewalks in front of the ice creameries. You may not be aware of the close relationships among these summer phenomena. Ice cream was invented by modifying a technology originally discovered for fireworks. And the way ice creams flavors are named turns out to have a surprising relationship with the evolutionary origin of the human smile. Prices are not Depression-era at the latest upscale creameries, though, where you'd be lucky to walk away with a pint of ice cream for less than seven dollars. At Smitten , in Hayes Valley, for example, they'll make your ice cream fresh when you order it, freezing it with liquid nitrogen. At other places the selling point is the the unusual flavors or their interesting names. At Humphry Slocombe you can get foie gras, pink grapfefruit tarragon, or strawberry black olive. Bi-Rite Creamery will happily sell you honey lavender, balsamic strawberry, and salted caramel. Mitchell 's specializes in Filipino and other tropical flavors, including halo halo, lucuma, ube purple yam , and avocado. And Mr. Miscellaneous seems to keep running out of their latest hip flavor, orange blossom. Well, actually, it turns out that orange blossom is not a newfangled flavor. Orange blossom is, in fact, the original ice cream flavor, appearing in the earliest recipes by the mid 's, the period when ice cream was invented. By about , a later edition of La Varenne's cookbook suggests using fresh orange flowers: You must take sweet cream, and put thererto handfuls of powdered sugar, and take petals of Orange Flowers and mince them small, and put them in your Cream, and if you have no fresh Orange Flowers you must take candied, with a drop of good Orange Flower water And by other ice cream flavors were developed as well, including pumpkin, chocolate, and lemon, as well as a plethora of early sorbets: sour cherry, cardamom, coriander-lemon, and strawberry. Where did these flavors come from? The use of orange flower should give you a clue: the historical roots of ice cream and sorbet, like many of our modern foods, lie in the Muslim world. These chilled but not frozen drinks have been popular throughoutt the Ottoman, Arab, and Persian worlds continuously since the Middle Ages. By the 16th century Italian and French travelers had brought back words of these Turkish sherbets. In one of the earliest mentions of the word in Europe, the French naturalist Pierre Belon in described sherbets in Istanbul made of figs, plums, apricots, and raisins. Thirsty passers-by would buy a glass of syrup from wandering sellers or stands, mixed with water and chilled with ice. But by sherbets were still unavailable in Europe; here's an excerpt from a letter an Italian traveler sent home in from Constantinople, from Elizabeth David's lovely book "Harvest of the Cold Months" : scerbet , a certain composition which they make These sherbets were the source of the fruit ices that we now call sorbets. But the Ottoman drinks and the modern Middle Eastern ones as well were not frozen; they were cooled with ice or snow just like modern lemonade. People had been putting ice and snow into drinks to cool them for over years, but freezing sweetened fruit juice or cream requires a much lower temperature than just ice can achieve. So where did the idea and the technology for freezing arise? Obviously liquid nitrogen, the darling freezing technology of modernist cuisine , was not available in the 16th century. The insight came from fireworks. In the 9th century, during the Tang dynasty, the Chinese first realized that saltpeter potassium nitrate could be mixed with sulpher and coal to create the explosive mixture we now call gunpowder. Gunpowder was quickly adopted by the Muslim world, where potassium nitrate was called Chinese snow in Arabic and Chinese salt in Persian. Dissolving salts like potassium nitrate KNO 3 in water breaks the bonds between the ions, drawing heat from the surrounding water. This endothermic reaction, the basis of the modern cold pack shown to the right, can drop the temperature of the water enough to freeze pure water, although not low enough to freeze fruit ices or ice cream. By the early 16th century this discovery was widely used in Muslim India to chill water for drinking. At this time most of what is today northern and central India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as parts of Afghanistan, was ruled by the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great. The Mughals were originally Turkic speakers from central Asia, and the royal line that conquered Delhi traced their descent from Genghis Khan Mughal was the Persian word for Mongol , but had adopted the Persian language and culture. By the time of Akbar, the Persian-speaking court at Agra was a center for the arts, architecture and literature. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata were translated from Sanskrit to Persian during this period, and Akbar's keen interest in painting and architecture led to the development of styles of art that mixed Persian, Hindu, and European forms. Like many places where scientific and culinary innovation and mixing flourished Moorish Spain, early Norman Sicily , Akbar's reign was a beacon of relative religious tolerance, in which the tax on non-Muslims was eliminated and other religions were allowed self-government. Agra and his later court in Lahore were steamy hot, and drinks were cooled by spinning a long-necked flask in saltpeter-water.